DEMO: Enterprise Tools Get Simple, Sophisticated

The morning sessions at DEMO on Tuesday ended with the first group of enterprise companies, which includes several vertical market solutions, as well as an interesting method for finding contractors and a very simple but powerful online database.

The morning sessions at DEMO on Tuesday ended with the first group of enterprise companies, which includes several vertical market solutions, as well as an interesting method for finding contractors and a very simple but powerful online database.

Blue Skies Hospitality Management Systems has a system aimed at helping manage restaurants, from accepting reservations to staff management to planning events. This allows restaurants to take their own reservations directly on their sites, as well as running the whole restaurant. It looked pretty good.

eXaudios Technology showed a call-center application called Maginify, which analyzes each side of a call, with a focus on identifying strong emotion on either side. This actually seems to a fairly complex call-management system, with the ability to do real-time recognition of strong feelings, so supervisors can make sure that calls are handled properly. After all, there's a clear difference when you get angry on a call; it's bad enough if it's a customer but really not good for an agent. Again, this looked good.

General Inspection has a device called "Li'l Magic" that's designed to make it easier for hardware stores and similar retailers to allow easy checkout of lots of little parts or components. The device uses laser optics to measure each characteristic of a part, such as a bolt, a screw, or just about anything else that is small, and then matches it with a template. Another sensor can determine the materials in the part, such as differentiating between chrome and stainless steel bolts. All this connects directly to the cash register and can hook into inventory management systems. It's a different solution to a problem I believe a number of stores have.

Green Nurture is a virtual suggestion box for employees: It collects suggestions on how a company can "go green" and improve sustainability. This includes surveys and assessment tools and is designed to let any company set up a sustainability initiative in under 20 minutes.

I've been a fan of simple databases for a very long time, and InfoDome has a very nice, simple online database that looks much easier than most of the solutions I've seen, yet still has a great deal of power. What makes it different is speed: it uses Flash rather than HTML, a very nice visual forms building tool, and lot of control over what database designers and individual users can see and edit.

You can embed information from other Web sites, import data from Excel and Access databases, and create visual reports in a report builder I thought looked very good. Other online databases seem either less powerful or aimed at larger customers (such as Quickbase), so I was very glad to see something that would make sense for small businesses and organization. It is free for small databases, with higher fees for bigger ones.

Network Hippo aggregates email and contact information from all of your sites, and lets you organize these contacts into groups on a Web site. You can then create "missions" so you can spread the world to specific groups of your contacts. It's designed for personal "CRM" or small businesses.

Solvate has a staffing engine for connecting companies with consultants and other freelancers. Companies can post a request for a person who can perform a specific task, and individuals can sign up with their information. Then the service will search its database and let you narrow down the search by looking at previous employers, specific skills, and more. It can also be limited to your LinkedIn network, and you can find people who have worked together before. It seems like an interesting concept.

Alpha pitch companies include Permissiontosend, which talked about a PIN-based email system designed to reduce spam ; Systems Thinking Institute, which has System Key, a product designed to manage risk in product designs; and Zurb, which talked about Verify, a service to let companies put up interactive tests (such as screen shots) to people in your social network.

I don't know enough about a lot of the vertical markets to judge the programs in those fields, though they looked good. But I thought Solvate was quite interesting and am looking forward to taking a closer look at InfoDome.

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in...
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